


Hot Air Balloon

by b00mgh



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Black Paladin Allura (Voltron), Everyone Is Doing Their Best, I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, Keith is doing his best, M/M, Memory Loss, Memory Related, Shiro (Voltron) Needs a Hug, Temporary Character Death, but he gets them back so...
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-15
Updated: 2018-11-15
Packaged: 2019-08-24 05:23:38
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,013
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16633772
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/b00mgh/pseuds/b00mgh
Summary: “Lance, don’t you remember?”“Remember what?”It’s not that the memories got destroyed irreparably, the way a toddler plays with Monopoly money, they’ve just been given back scattered on the floor, the way a toddler plays with Scrabble tiles. They were taken by accident, nobody knew the creature meant THAT when they said they’d take what the paladins knew in exchange for help. Once the damage had been done, the creature had seemed surprised at the miscommunication and agreed to give the memories back.Still, even with the memories back in his head, they were still Scrabble tiles, scattered and on the floor, and they didn’t just snap into words like you wish they would. Lance would need time to remember, to put the pieces back on the board the way they had been arranged before, one letter at a time.Everyone tries to make do, tried to keep their chins up, tried to keep everything steady. Lance could still fly his lion, and he said it was muscle memory kickstarting real memory. Lance still functioned without much difficulty, it was only the first two days where he had to be surveilled like a baby. Lance is still Lance, with the same personality and quirks and smile.





	Hot Air Balloon

“Just one of us? You only want to know what one of us knows?” Pidge clarifies, because it’s a frankly odd request.

“Just one of you! That’s all!” The creature, who has not been forthcoming with a name, is practically shouting, arms waving in a manner that might be an attempt at placation. He’s got an expression, underneath the feathers, that you could relate to an honest used car salesman trying to get you not to buy something when you could be doing better. 

“And then you’ll just show us where the Galra base is? Like, immediately?” Keith’s got a distrustful frown, but when doesn’t he?

“I can show you right now,” the creature assures, “and one of you can stay back with me, and then we’ll both get what we want, and things will be just sun!” This creature has some quality to their speech, not just the small inaccuracies, but even the tone, that sound something like a foreigner still working on their English. An uncertainty in their own words. 

“Just “sun”?” 

“Oh, that’s not quite the right word. Our languages aren’t very switching, are they? Um… sun–...shine? Things will be just sunshine?”

“Well, we understand you either way,” Hunk gives a lopsided, understanding grin. Not every language is so easy to translate from English– Hunk had trouble with Spanish classes on Earth, and that’s a human language, he can’t imagine how much harder an alien language must be.

“You guys go catch up with Shiro and Allura,” Lance insists, “I’ll tell them whatever they want to hear.”

Shiro and Allura had been on a diplomatic mission on a nearby (and somewhat more inhabited) planet when the natives decided they liked their chances better with the Galra and turned the two of them over. Hence, the urgency of the mission. Nobody doubted that they could handle themselves, but also nobody was letting anybody else rot in a prison cell, or on an execution block. 

“Lance, I don’t know–” Keith tries to interrupt, but Lance has, in fact, thought this out.

“This is a mission where you need a tech expert, someone for stealth, and some heavy firepower– and it’s a lot faster for one of us to stay and the rest to go immediately than for us all to wait around.” Lance gives a wry grin, realistic and calculating. “Allura and Shiro are waiting,” he reiterates, “and I don’t want to bank on all of us hiking through this shit terrain at night.”

The terrain is shit, Keith has to admit. Unstable where it’s not rocky, and with puddles of something sticky and resembling quicksand where it’s not unstable. It would be suicide to try going it at night, and nobody is sure how long it’s going to be before Allura and Shiro are transferred somewhere more mainstream, somewhere harder to get to. It’s got to be today, and they don’t have endless light, and Lance is technically right. Pidge’s technology for navigation, Keith’s stealth for scouting ahead, and Hunk’s heavy hits to make it past some more heavily guarded areas. Not that they don’t need a sharpshooter, there’s just got to be one person staying behind. 

“Fine,” Keith mutters, “meet us there.”

“Wouldn’t miss this one, Mullet.” 

And Lance winks, and Keith grumbles into his hand so nobody suspects anything about the color of his face, and Pidge says to stop being gross and let’s go, and Keith asks what she’s talking about, and Lance says tell Shiro and Allura he said hi if he’s not there before they find them. 

Once it’s just Lance and the creature are alone, they say “Ok, just sit back and get comfortable, this might be cat scratches.”

Lance gets what they mean from context and asks “Don’t you want me to just tell you?”

The creature seems to misunderstand Lance, because they frown and squint and eventually give up in favor of placing a blinding webbed hand between his eyes, and then Lance is out for the count. 

He sees his life slide around him in evanescent flashes, breakfast to training with Shiro to meeting Allura to flight simulators with Pidge to pissing off Keith to playing cars with Hunk to his sister’s face to his mom’s voice and then nothing. 

Nothing at all.

He wakes up on the inside of Blue– and he only knows Blue because there’s still a bond there and she can remember that much for the both of them, but she’s not all-powerful and she can only pilot herself to a certain extent, can only tell him her name and that there’s no reason to be afraid. To Lance, if he were able to compare this to something, he would compare it to being in the womb: quiet and alone with just a mother that you don’t know yet, but that you trust to take care of you. 

He’s got a helmet on, and after a minute he can hear people screaming into it. He can hear the syllables, but can’t understand the words.

“Are they okay!?”

“They’re fine, I’ve got ‘em. We’re heading back to the castle. Hunk, Pidge, get your asses out of there.”

“Roger.”

“Has anyone seen Lance yet?”

“Still nothing, he’s not responding over the comms. Blue is still active and stationary.”

“Okay. That’s nearer the castle than we are, he can meet us there.”

“Guys, I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”

“About the Galra on our tail? Me too.”

“Oh– sorry– on it.”

“Thanks.”

“Red has the Castle in sight, I’m going to get these two into pods– Allura! You’re awake!”

Smaller, less distinct, sharper noises crackle through on thin threads. 

“Right, okay, Allura does  _ not _ need a pod, but I want to stick Shiro in one just to be safe– I know you did. Allura, it’s just to be sure.  _ Thank you _ .”

“Green is landing.”

“Yellow right behind ya’.”

Silence again. Lance still can’t really string thoughts together. He sits, vacuous enough to lack even confusion, and waits and waits. Eventually, more noises come through the helmet. 

“Lance? Lance, you out there? I’m sending a beacon to Blue. If you don’t respond to that, I’m going to assume that feathery thing kicked your ass, and I’m going to be a little disappointed.” Something bright began to flash, and Lance hates it for how loud it is. Outside, Blue begins to move on her own. Slow and steady and a little clumsy without a pilot. “Shiro and Allura are fine, they hadn’t even gotten into questioning, barely scratches. Shiro spent all of ten minutes in a pod. They said we were dumb for trusting a random lifeform right after they had been captured, but they aren’t mad. Oh, Blue’s moving. Are you okay then? If you lost your helmet again I swear–… You usually fly faster than this… Hey, Pidge? How would we know if Blue was moving by herself? Oh, that easy? Humm… I’m gonna go wait in the loading bay for Lance, be right back– save my plate, Hunk! Lance, if you’ve got your helmet on and you can hear me, just hang tight, I’m on my way.”

Lance thinks some of these syllables sound more significant than others– “Lance” had been repeated a lot. What is “Lance?”

When Blue stops moving, her jaw opens to reveal a form– and wasn’t that a strange thing to see! Lance stares, slightly awed by something that looks like that, all organic edges and soft fabric. 

“Lance, what the–?” Lance doesn’t move, doesn’t recognize the syllables that are, by then, clearly directed at him. “Lance?” Nothing. “I’ll be right back, Lance, you stay right there.” And the new form runs off. Lance isn’t sure he likes that. He hadn’t known anything before, hadn’t felt anything, but then something was there and then it wasn’t and now he feels the absence of it and just like that the first emotion he feels is  _ loneliness _ . He stands, begins to follow where the form had lead, but it moved faster than he does and is already out of sight and Lance stops following when he reaches a door, not remembering how to open a door, and begins to cry at the foot of it. 

The form comes back, as Lance doesn’t understand that they said they would, and has several others following. They all squint at him, confused, and the biggest one picks him up in his big arms and holds him. “Lance, buddy, what’s wrong?”

Lance still has no idea what’s being said to him. But he likes the warm, big arms, and stops crying.

“Well, that was fast,” the tiniest form scoffs.

“This doesn’t feel right to me,” the biggest form mumbles, and the tenor rumbles in his chest so that Lance can feel it. 

“Yeah, Hunk’s right,” the first form says, “he hasn’t said a word, not even through the comms when I was talking to him.”

“Maybe he just doesn’t like you?”

“Ha-ha, Pidge.”

“Well, let’s go sit down and see if we can get him to tell us what happened?” says a form in the back, and they’re missing an arm. 

“I agree, maybe when he’s calmed down he’ll be more forthcoming,” says a tall form with the longest hair.

Lance is herded inside, and he is very grateful that everyone else opens the doors because he still isn’t sure how they work. 

“Lance, what happened? With the creature?”

The forms say “Lance” a lot when they look right at him. Is he “Lance?”

“Lance, did he hurt you?”

There it is again. Maybe he is “Lance.”

“Lance, you’ve got to say something.”

Maybe “Lance” should learn to say these syllables. Maybe then he might understand these forms better. 

“Lance?”

And Lance opens his mouth, but nothing comes out, so he tries again, tries to mimic the way their mouths move when they say “Lance,” and out comes a sound! “La.”

Lance is ecstatic! “La!” he cries, “La! La!” he’s laughing, giddy. “La!” 

The forms all have matching furrowed brows, they’re not laughing.

“Is it brain damage?” the shortest one reaches out a hand, then retracts it. Lance wishes they would leave their hand there for him to play with. 

The form missing an arm scratches their head, “Let’s get him into a pod and find out.”

“And maybe beat the shit out of a feathered freak,” the first form spits derisively. 

“Maybe— if they deserve it,” the tall, long-haired form assents, and Lance is shuffled through more doorways and into a clear tube. The biggest form nudges him into it, and Lance trusts him so he steps into it, and then the front closes and a mist creeps in and Lance screams and cries to get out in the last seconds before he’s asleep. 

“Not brain damage,” Coran mutters, somber and confused. 

Pidge frowns heavily, pushing her glasses up a wrinkled nose, “So he’s just got baby-brain for no reason?”

“Well, there’s no sign of any injury,” Coran insists, “not even any abnormalities. Brain function, mass, none of it is out of place for a human of his age.” He throws his hands up helplessly. They all feel a little helpless. 

“So what happened to him?” Hunk whines, fearful and uncertain. 

Keith snaps, “I say we go ask that feathery asshole.”

“Language, Keith,” Shiro can’t deny that Keith has a point though, and sighs. “It’s the middle of the night,” if they had gone right after Lance had returned, they would have had a ray of sunlight left to guide them, but no such luck at this hour on this planet, “there’s no way to make it there in the dark. We'll ask when the sun comes up.”

“How long is a solar cycle on this planet?” Allura asks, “there wasn’t any, um, windows, in the cell.” She seems ashamed, something Shiro will later talk her out of. He’s been a captive before, and guilt doesn’t make any of it better. 

Pidge and Coran glance at each other: they hadn’t checked yet, they hadn’t even been on the planet a day, hadn’t planned on sticking around. Pidge whirls to type on a computer and it spits out a figure: 62.6 hours per solar cycle. The sun will be up in 31 hours. The unpredictable terrain is unintelligible without the orange-gold sunlight that sprayed light over the whole hemisphere during the day. They have to wait that long. 

And even then, there is no guarantee that the feathery creature can fix whatever it is they had done. 

 

Lance flops out of the pod like a ragdoll, right into the arms of the very big form— person, his brain supplies from somewhere. But he remembers this person, and they put him in that prison and he won’t go back in and he screams and runs away from them.

The big person looks sad, why do they look sad? 

All the other forms back away, and Lance doesn’t want them to back away just like he doesn’t want them to come close. He’s still screaming. 

“LANCE!” The first person, the one with black hair and a frowning face, shouts over the screaming with a stern voice and Lance shuts up because that is his name that he’s just heard. “Thank god, my eardrums we’re gonna pop, idiot,” and the person sighs and holds out a hand, “com’ere. You need to eat.” 

Lance still has no idea what any of those words mean but he goes to the outstretched hand and holds it and wipes his tears and the person leads him through another doorway and another hallway to a big table with half-full plates all over the surface. 

“Baby Lance hates me!” the big person moans dramatically. 

“Well he didn’t like the pod,” says the little person, “and you put him in there.”

“ _ He hates me _ !”

The person attached to Lance’s hand looked up, “he might like you again if you feed him.”

“How do you know he’s hungry?” the long-haired person asks. 

“He hasn’t eaten since this morning— I know  _ I’d  _ be hungry.”

The big person brings a plate of something green. Lance isn’t sure he wants to eat green, and the presence of the big person does not help. He sinks low in his chair, dragging the hand of the person with the black hair with him. 

“Lance, will you eat your food?” They snap. 

Lance doesn’t know what was said but peels up at the mention of his name. 

“Oh, can I feed him? I always loved feeding little Altean babies— and this is sort of similar.” 

The armless person and the little person laugh, the big person moves to the side, and the long-haired person sits next to him and holds up a spoon of green. “Here comes the battleship!” they sing, and the spoon comes forward. 

Lance isn’t sure what this is, but he takes a hint from the way their mouth forms a big O and opens wide, and he gets a spoon of green  _ inside his mouth _ . He prepares for a scream, but swallows and then realizes the green tastes about like nothing and immediately fills him up a little, and he opens his mouth again. 

“He likes it!” the long-haired person cries, smiling widely. 

“He still hates me,” the big person wallows. 

“I’m so excited! Does anyone else want to feed him?”

“Not really,” the little person says, “but I  _ will  _ take a picture to embarrass him when he gets his head back.” They seem suddenly uncertain. “He, um, he  _ will _ get his head back, right?” 

“If I got a say in it,” the black-haired person spits, and their grip on Lance’s hand crushes inwards. It doesn’t hurt, so Lance doesn’t care, but he does look away from the spoon to make sure this gesture isn’t supposed to get his attention. 

“La!” he says again, and the long-haired person brings him another spoon of goo, and the little person laughs again. That’s good. 

 

“I’m getting weirded out,” Pidge says. 

“So you keep telling us,” Hunk grumbles, still grumpy that Lance doesn’t trust him.

“Well, it’s not like he can understand words– he barely knows his own name!” She’s getting frustrated, and understandably, they’ve put Lance to bed (which involved Keith sitting next to him for half an hour until he drifted off, because Lance would not, for his life or their eardrums, let go of his hand) because they’re not sure what else to do with him. 

“Why was he holding my hand like that?” Keith mutters, and he’s trying to be very understanding about this, if only to be able to tease Lance later. 

Coran shrugs, “Well, if we’re assuming he’s got, as Pidge is calling it “baby-brain,” and if we’re assuming that human babies are anything like Altean babies–”

“That is a lot of assuming,” Shiro reminds everyone.

“–Then he probably just appreciated the contact. Babies like to be held. He took just as well to Hunk’s holding him… before we put him in the pod, of course.” 

“Why do you keep bringing it up!?”

“Maybe we can go find feather-thing if we bring, like, a  _ really _ big flashlight,” Pidge suggests.

“Flashlight is not going to be bright enough to show the difference between sand and quicksand–” Keith grudgingly tells her, “even the sun on this fucking planet is barely bright enough for that.”

“Language, Keith,” Shiro mutters, on instinct, even though he’s lost in thought. If he had been reset, completely, to a relatively blank slate, what would be best for him? For the team? Allura  _ can  _ pilot Blue, but the lion has made her preferences clear and that is a last-resort option. They can’t very well dismantle the Galran empire one paladin short, they’re barely managing with seven functioning members. 

“We can’t just force him to remember if he’s drawing a blank,” Shiro says quietly, and everyone looks to him as the authority on having your head tampered with. “He’ll just have to… re-learn, I guess.”

“What, like, everything?”

“If that’s what it takes.”

“ _ My best friend is going to hate me forever! _ ”

“This is still weirding me out.”

 

When Lance wakes up, he is alone. He doesn’t like that, so he screams and cries until somebody shows up. Lance still doesn’t know how to operate a door to get out of his room, after all. It’s the armless one that answers the door, and they look exhausted. Do they ever sleep?

“What is it, Lance? It’s barely seven in the morning. We can’t go see the feather-guy until at least tomorrow, can’t you just sleep through this? I’ve never been good with babies.”

Lance pats the shoulder where the person’s arm should have grown out of. He found red, knotted skin. Scar is the word his brain came up with, and he thinks that he’s pretty sure those hurt.

Shiro doesn’t mind about Lance pawing at his lack of an arm. “You don’t understand a word I’m saying, do you?”

“Ow?” Lance mutters, and he looks genuinely empathetic. It’s the same face he’d be making if he and Shiro had been talking about how his arm got like this, that same depth, but lacking the gory context and the dredging of memory typically required to get there. Lance, with baby-brain, is still Lance, after all. 

Comforted somewhat by that thought, Shiro sighs, softens, and says “Nobody else’ll be up for another hour, but let’s go see if Hunk was nice and left us some leftovers. Even I can reheat space leftovers. Get it? Because they don’t need reheating. Matt always cooked.” Shiro rambles as Lance follows, and he finds it’s easier to talk to Lance like this, when there isn’t a single memory or coherent thought in the kid's brain, when there’s no history of Shiro being a leader, where there’s no expectation. It’s like talking to an old friend– and sort of a less lonely version of talking to yourself. 

 

It turns out Hunk was nice and did leave them leftovers, and Shiro has just enough time to put them on a plate before Pidge stumbles into the kitchen thinking it’s time for a three a.m. snack. It should be noted that Pidge does this every morning because the only thing worse than her sense of time is her sleep schedule. 

Lance is starting to pick up the spoon– trying to hold it the way he saw the long-haired form hold it before– but he’s floundering. Pidge watches him as he relearns how to eat for himself. It takes him a few minutes, but he gets a bite in and turns and grins at her, so bright, unabashedly proud, the same glow in his eyes when it was just the two of them that one night on the training deck and they made it past level ten and he got a headshot on that one really fast bot and Pidge supposes the Lance, even with baby-brain, is still Lance, after all. 

When he’s eaten and she’s eaten she tells Shiro she’ll watch Lance for a while and he shrugs and says ok and she grabs Lance’s hand, very big for a baby hand, and sprints down the hallway back into her room. Lance is still Lance and they can still have fun. 

Pidge’s room is an organized chaos of electronic bits and pieces organized by the function if she knows it and the form if she doesn’t. She lets Lance sit on the bed where it’s least crowded and digs through some larger pieces of stuff until she’s found what she’s looking for. Scrap metal, squishy thingy, probably-an-engine.

Lance stares at her working, mumbling, “La!” and “Aa,” and “pfffffft,” as he feels the situation calls for them. He’s still got no idea what the tiny person is doing, and they aren’t saying any of those syllables that he can’t understand, so he just watches, and that’s fine, if a little boring. 

Eventually, the tiny person exclaims “Perfect! Probably,” and they turn to him, “you never wanted to try this before because you ‘didn’t want your beautiful face any more damaged,” they use a funny voice for that part so Lance laughs, “but right now you don’t remember caring about your face, do you? And it’s going to be fun, I promise you that much, Lance. Hop in!” Lance still has no idea what’s being said, but the tiny form pats a flat spot on top of a weird little contraption, and Lance climbs aboard. “We’re just going to go for a little test drive, okay? It’ll be fun!”

“La!”

“I will take that as willing consent. Let’s  _ goooo _ !” And then Lance is shooting down the hallway, out the door, past the rooms, zooming so fast he can barely see anything going by. It’s fun until it’s scary. Too fast, too fast, and Lance feels any little autonomous control he had over his body slip away, and he doesn’t know where he’s going, and he’s alone again, and he likes none of those, so he begins to cry and scream again, and before he knows it there’s a crash and a fall and then Lance is settled inside someone’s arms and he immediately ceases the crying and the screaming. 

It’s the big person, the one he didn’t like before, but that he is currently willing to put up with because they are warm, and they smell like food, and they are holding Lance and saying, very softly, “Pidge, look, he doesn’t hate me anymore!”

“Pidge, did you seriously–?”

“Keith, look, he doesn’t hate me anymore!”

“And I’m very happy for you, but Pidge that was  _ dumb _ .”

“Oh, hush,  _ Shiro _ .”

The form with the dark hair throws his hands up, and Lance’s brain supplies the word exasperated. Lance laughs.

“Lance doesn’t know any better right now, so we have to know better for him. That was irresponsible use of a baby.”

“Lance liked it,” and Lance looks up at the mention of his name, “didn’t you, Lance?”

“La!”

“Don’t encourage her– you get into enough trouble when you have a full brain! Hunk, help me out here!”

“Let’s go get you some more food, huh, Lance?”

“He just ate, but I think Allura is awake now, she’d be mad if we didn’t let her feed him.”

Lance let himself be carried out of the room, and begrudgingly admitted that the big person wasn’t so bad, even if they had put him in that cage that one time– but that was already so long ago that who cares. 

 

By the next morning, the sun has come up (somewhat), and Keith and Hunk take Lance in the speeder to see what can be done, and what was done. 

The feathered creature is much more fluent in Earth languages when they see them. 

“Oh, paladins, I was thinking you might come back, what with–” they look at Lance, and flutters their shoulder feathers in a gesture of embarrassment.

Keith has no issues with violence, which is why he was sent, “What did you do to Lance?” and he’s already lunging.

But this is why Hunk was sent as well, and he holds Keith back by the jacket collar. The threat is enough anyway. 

“It was a misunderstanding! You all agreed and it wasn’t until I absorbed his memories that I realized the words we had been using were not quite right between our languages!” Rather than threatened, the feathered creature looks thoroughly chastised. “I’ve felt terrible about it all night, I could hardly sleep. I’ll give your friend his memories back, I can survive on the echoes for a while, but…”

Keith’s eyes go a little yellow, “but what?” he snaps. He thinks they are being blackmailed.

“But he won’t be quite the same, not for a while.”

“Why the fuck not?” Keith growls.

“Well, it’s a bit like a pile of dirt. You keep passing a pile of dirt around and the bits won’t be in the same spot when you get the pile back.”

“You  _ broke  _ Lance’s memories?” This is Hunk, screeching incredulously in a way that makes Lance frown, even without knowing what’s being said.

Webbed fingers fly up to placate, “No! No! It’s just–… how do I explain this? The memories will be there, but he’ll need to put them back in place on his own.”

So Lance got his brain back. 

“Lance, buddy, you remember me?” Hunk asks, a little tentatively, once the three of them are settled into the speeder. 

“Of course, I’d never forget you, Hunk!” Lance replies, immediately, on instinct, and Hunk breathes a sigh of relief, but then his face screws up and he looks at Hunk for a long time while he drives. He knows Hunk is his friend, his best friend, but that’s where it ends. 

There’s a boy on his other side, too, wearing a red jacket and dark hair. Who is that again? It takes Lance several minutes. “Keith! You’re Keith!” 

“Yeah?” For a second, Keith is confused, and then it dawns on him. “Oh,  _ yeah _ !” Keith is so excited that he isn’t forgotten that he forgets that he shouldn’t care. 

“Oh, man. I feel like I’m forgetting something important.” Lance says this in Spanish, and the others just understand him because of the translators in their helmets. “Where are we?”

“Hunk, what are we calling this planet?”

“‘Dumb’? I don’t know, I don’t think we had time to figure it out.”

“Are we going back to the Garrison now?” Lance asks, “Or my house?” that’s the cognitive dissonance of a memory jumble kicking in. “My head hurts. Where are we?” Hunk and Keith exchange a concerned look that Lance doesn’t miss and they tell him they’ll explain everything back at the castle ship. Lance doesn’t question what the castle ship is, which is promising evidence that he does remember it. 

 

When they arrive, Pidge is bouncing on her toes at the entrance to the landing bay,  whirling to say something to Shiro every once in a while, and Shiro will calmly respond, and Pidge will go back to bouncing on her toes. 

“Lance!” she shouts, “Do you remember me? My name is Pidge.”

“Pidge, yes! You’re, um, you’re not my sister–”

“Her name is Veronica,” Hunk reminds him gently.

“Right right right. I know you, Pidge, I swear I do, but, um, from where?”

“We met at the Garrison, you, me, and Hunk were a team.”

“How could I forget that, of course!” There’s a suspicious look in his eyes for a second, he inches closer to Pidge and whispers “You sure Keith wasn’t on our team too?”

“Yeah.”

“ _ Really _ sure?”

“I can hear you, and I wasn’t.”

“I remember being on some kinda team with you. I know it!” 

Pidge finds this hilarious, and so do Hunk and Shiro after a minute. Keith is unamused and crosses his arms so everyone knows.

“Oh, Lance, do you remember Shiro?” Pidge suddenly interrupts.

The first instinct is to burst with the adoration of a hero, because that’s the first thing Lance remembers, but he curbs it with the grief and confusion of white hair and a missing arm and a faint memory of idle chatter on the way to a kitchen. “Of course I do, but I still don’t know from where.”

“Well, let’s try to patch up some holes then. Allura and Coran are waiting on the bridge.”

“Oh, those guys! They have the cool face markings, right?”

 

Lance, once everyone has pitched in to tell him of their current goal and his place in it, does seem to remember it all well enough, but his brow stays screwed up into his forehead. 

“You seem like you want to ask something,” Shiro coaxes. 

“I feel like I do,” he admits, “but I don’t know what questions to ask.” 

“It’ll come to you, my boy,” Coran reassures him. Coran seems to be handling this better than anyone else. He never knew Lance before as the other humans did, and he doesn’t necessarily need anything spectacular from him like Allura does, so he’s content to let Lance take this at whatever pace works. 

As for everyone else. They tell him stories. 

Hunk has known Lance since they were six years old– they met through a school pen pal system and their families would take vacations to visit (it’s not like either of their hometowns were anything less than resort spots, so these visits were not solely for the children): he knows Lance from his toenails to his meds, but he only tells stories about the toenails. He reminds him of his mother, his siblings, his father, his home. Lance, as he always has, sinks into Hunk’s arms and listens for hours until he can’t anymore. He remembers his family, his home, but that’s when the loneliness strikes like venom, and he would hate to cry on Hunk– Hunk has always had the softest eyes, and they’ll never tell when the man’s heart is breaking. Lance remembers that. 

Pidge met Lance in the Garrison, and the two of them were notorious for their pranks, and for dragging Hunk behind them with a whine. She tells him of their escapades, of their daring escapes, of their illegal mall visits and out-of-hand engineering class projects. Lance, still very much himself, will sit next to her while she codes something new into Rover II’s program and tells him all about the functioning hot air balloon they demonstrated for an irate Iverson, about how it only got about twenty feet into the air before their shoddy stitchwork sent them plummeting, and she’ll keep telling him until he’s fast asleep, head next to her keyboard. She likes to have someone next to her, even when she doesn’t say so. Lance feels like he remembers that.

Shiro met Lance just at the start of all of this, so he’ll tell him about the first time he piloted Blue, how she just opened up to him and nobody else could touch her at first. About how fast he gained mastery of his bayard, about food fights and about that one time he brought a cow home somehow. Lance, with a glimmer of new understanding brought on by ignorance of everything, pushes every responsibility off of Shiro’s shoulders and says that that is  _ no way _ to refer to a lady, and Shiro thinks that this is him being taken too seriously for a moment until he realizes it’s a joke and some sediments of tension just melt from his shoulders in a way he didn’t remember it still could. Shiro needs someone to tell him it isn’t all on him, that he doesn’t have to be the adult. Lance gets that feeling from him.

Allura has just known Lance since after she realized her whole civilization was dead and gone, and so she reminisces with him. She’ll tell him stories of her parents, her people, her friends that she’ll never see again and of her grief. She’ll unload like she would never have thought to do with Lance before he lost it all, before she’d had an excuse to tell him things. Lance, with new empathy, will hold her shoulders as she lets herself cry, and he’ll tell her that it’ll be okay as long as she remembers them all. Allura has needed this since she shattered the last visage she had of her father. Lance understands that.

Coran has known Lance about as long as Allura, but he can’t bear to unpack on him like that. He’ll tell Lance of their diplomatic missions, how far they’ve come, how proud he is. Lance, with a new and familiar sensation blossoming in his chest, will let Coran ramble about whatever the man chooses to. It’s a soothing thing for both of them. Coran lost the son he adopted. Lance learns that. 

Keith has known Lance in the strangest of capacities, before Pidge and the rest, but after Hunk, but never quite as well as anyone else immediately knew him until about a year into this messed up intergalactic clusterfuck. Too many walls up. And many more still. He doesn’t know what to tell Lance, so he lets Lance ask. And he’ll never dodge a question, not when it’s asked like that, with wide, wide eyes and uncertain hands. Lance, being someone entirely new, doesn’t know what to ask sometimes, so they’ll just sit and talk like there’s nothing to talk about, no gaps to fill in. For them, there isn’t. Keith has never been good with friends. Lance doesn’t remember that. 

And so pieces begin to fall into place. Lance tries to keep the cracks out of his smile, even when they feel wider than the ceramic edges of his memories. Every once in a while he’ll drop off one of those edges, those sharp, precipitous edges, and he’ll plummet and someone will find him crying for what he can’t remember or staring into space for hours. 

He abandons his jacket, says it’s too hot for a jacket, and Hunk is too nervous to pick it back up and nobody else knows quite what it means but Keith remembers how deep Lance stuffs his hands in the pockets and how he’d stretch it over his whole self when he was feeling alone and how he told him, one time, accidentally and very quietly, that he sometimes pretended it still smelled like home, so Keith picks it up and puts it under Lance’s pillow. Lance is none the wiser, but he sleeps easier.

But they can’t recuperate forever. Blue has proved herself more than willing to fly with Lance even if he sometimes forgets what  _ that _ button does, she reminds him because she knows what all of her buttons do. As long as it’s Lance. She won’t fly with Allura anymore. The lions seem to have a solidarity now, a solidarity they did not have quite so organized when Shiro went missing the first time, that they will stick with their paladins. Green with Pidge, Yellow with Hunk, Blue with Lance, Red with Keith, and Black with Allura. 

They had tried consoling Shiro over the loss of Black, but Shiro said it wasn’t like Black kicked him out, she just told him to let someone else drive. He’d said it was a relief, that he could be useful in other ways: diplomatic missions, castle maintenance, training, ground combat. He just couldn’t fly anymore, and he makes it as clear as he can that he had never been cut out to be a leader. Nobody seems to believe him, except Lance in recent days, and you’ve never seen the man with such a bounce in his step, like the arm he’s missing has scooped some of the weight off his shoulders. 

But, as said before, life goes on, with or without Lance, Shiro, Allura, or anyone else. 

They’ve got a distress signal coming in, and nobody really trusts that anymore. Not after last time where Shiro and Allura got kidnapped leading to Lance getting a really solid mind wipe. But what’s the other option? Not go and leave a potentially genuinely at-risk planet to slavery or genocide? That’s not really Voltron’s style. But nobody is going anywhere alone. Coran stays with the castle ship, and between the sentient robot cats and the psychic mice and the semi-self-aware castle ship, he’s about as far from alone as can be. Allura, with something possessive in her eyes, says she’ll stick with Shiro, and they’re going to be the point of contact with the people. Pidge and Hunk go together like peanut butter and jelly, and they’ll be back up forces floating in the mid-range of the atmosphere. Keith and Lance are deemed most appropriate for scouting the surrounding reef forests to ensure there’s nothing inherently malicious hiding in the rocky plant life. 

They skirt a radius of something like two miles from the meeting point, where Allura and Shiro paint the perfect picture of ally ambassadors, before spiraling slowly inwards, wordless, with feet soundless over the pale gray magnetic sand. 

There are footprints, but it’s hard to tell what from because who knows what kind of footprint the natives leave– or the galra for that matter. It puts Lance and Keith on high alert, but not an alert high enough to give away their position by broadcasting it over the comms. Nothing else makes noise in these coral forests because everything is burrowed under the sand, hibernating until the 50-degree winter shifts to the 200-degree summer. It’s no wonder everything is the same pale shade of gray: it all gets bleached in the scorching sunlight. Lance finds himself remembering hot beach days with… who was it? Pidge? No, no, not even close. It had been Veronica, and she had told him a secret that Lance supposes she no longer needs to worry about him spilling. He’s begging for a distraction, but the monotonous t.v. static of the sand and coral offers nothing of the sort. He’s trapped with his own scrabble-tile thoughts, trying to make words, and he hates it.

Once they have circled the meeting place, where the locals have moved on from introductions to begging for protection, Lance and Keith give a discreet click over the comms to let Allura and Shiro know the place checks out before working their way back out. 

The planet is too damn silent. Even breathing seems to disturb the air– and the air is thicker than molasses. Pidge said before they left that it wasn’t because of anything in the air, it was that the air was just electrically and magnetically charged. Not dangerous to breathe, just difficult. 

Lance remembers that beach day, and it was hard to breathe then too– so humid, and it made the colors brighter, and he misses colors as much as he misses Veronica. He glances at Keith’s suit, the bright red, just to make sure he can still remember what the color is called. Keith’s cheeks are a little red too, he’s not wearing his helmet either and Lance can tell he’s struggling. He’d ask Keith if they should stop for a minute, catch their breath, but he’s not too sure he wants to do that. A red-faced, slightly panting Keith is just fine too. Lance remembers kissing a boy in a closet at a birthday party– who’s birthday had it been? What game had him kissing a boy in a closet? Why had they been in a closet at all?

Lance wants to talk to Keith, just to hear his voice, but he’s got the feeling from the pinched expression wrinkling Keith’s nose that he wouldn’t be met with any kind of small talk. Especially not if it’s just for Lance to make sure he remembers what words mean. Lance remembers not knowing what words mean. 

“Keith,” Lance whispers. Keith wants to be annoyed. They’re supposed to be stealthy. It’s only a little ways longer until they’ve reached the edge of the two-mile radius they’ve been circling, and then the castle ship is parked right there and they can go inside and Lance can talk all he wants. He should be annoyed. But he can’t keep it up. Lance has that singing in his voice that means he’s remembered something. Keith can’t be mad with Lance singing his name like that. Loves it too much. 

“What?” he huffs, trying to sound annoyed anyway as he pauses in the alcove of a twisted coral tree.

Stepping into the hiding space, Lance is too close for comfort. Keith’s got to look up to make eye contact. “I just remembered what that hairstyle is called.”

And here it comes. The teasing that Keith will groan at and Lance will pester him with. It’s the rivalry neither of them really wanted and had only temporarily needed coming back. Keith frowns.

“It’s called a fringe, isn’t it?”

And Keith is left gawking a little. Partly because calling his hair fringe is even further off than calling it a mullet. Partly because Lance called his hair something other than a mullet. Keith, for the first time since Lance lost his memories, has the acute feeling of being in a nightmare. Hunk felt it when Lance screamed to be left alone and Pidge felt it when Lance fell out of her racecar contraption and Shiro felt it the first split-second that Lance saw him after retrieving his memories and Allura felt it when Lance asked her about her ears and Coran felt it when he saw the lights dim in Lance’s eyes, but this is Keith’s first time. He hates it.

“No,” he mutters, a little more perniciously than he initially intended, “it’s called a mullet–” but he doesn’t get the full sound of the “t” in there because before he knows it Lance is slamming him into the sharp edges of the coral.

Something silent and deadly has pierced the coral just behind where his head had been, and the laser had exploded the sun-bleached rock. 

Keith has no idea how Lance heard a silenced weapon coming– Lance certainly hadn’t  _ seen  _ it coming, the shot came from behind him– but he’ll have time to figure that out later. For the moment, Keith is torn between the arousal of oncoming battle and the arousal of having Lance pressed so neatly against him so that not even the gravitational atmosphere could put something between their bodies. His bayard is activated and held in a clenched fist at his side. 

“Lan–”

“Sh,” it’s sharp and short, but it might as well be a purr, according to Keith’s body. He does his best to wrench his head back into the right place. 

Another shot, and a stupid, desperate one shatters a gnarled outcropping of coral, barely a foot to their left. The sniper has been caught, and they know it. They’re galra, because otherwise they would have admitted defeat and returned. A sniper stands no chance after they’ve been outed. 

Keith waits, waits, and as surely as the magnetic sand sticks to his suit there comes another shot, this one farther away than the last, and Keith uses the cover of the exploding coral’s noisy clatter to switch places with Lance, shoving him into the corner. 

“Stay here,” he hisses through bared teeth. Lance, still occasionally forgetting how to operate the food dispenser and still sometimes forgetting to tie his tennis shoes when he’s not wearing his suit and still once in a while forgetting how to pronounce a word, is not going to go toe-to-toe with a sniper. Not until he’s back to his old self and ready. Not if Keith has any say.

Which he does. So he shoves Lance into cover and tells him to stay and runs off in the direction that the sniper fired from.

Stay here. 

Lance knows Keith is trying to protect him. He can see it in the way the whites of his eyes go golden, a golden that seems so much brighter against the monochrome of the coral. He knows he might not be ready to fight this battle. He also knows that whatever that creature took from his brain, none of it included the muscle memory that keeps his aim at a crackshot and keeps his hands lethal. Lance, for reasons he only faintly remembers, does know the feeling of a spine snapping under your fingers.

But he’ll stay anyways because he trusts Keith to handle this. Keith, who is as dependable as a star is warm and is just as lethal. He can handle this, given there’s only one sniper. And if there was more than one sniper there would have been more than one of those introductory shots. The galra make up for in persistence what they lack in precision. It’s their fatal flaw. Always a crack in the defense. , no matter how thick that defense is. 

But then there’s a stifled groan of pain. Not a bullet wound because there was no sound, not even silenced, and because not even Keith can stifle a scream when you’ve just been shot with a laser rifle. Not galra because Lance knows what Keith sounds like, remembers it, even a pained half-noise like that. 

Stay here.

But fuck that, for the current moment, and Lance sprints from behind the coral and weaves around the organic structure of it until he finds Keith, laying low on his side, a little less than five feet from a scorched mark in the pale gray sand. The magnetic stuff has clung to his armor, covering the red of it in gray, and Lance crouches next to him, resisting the urge to copy the sand.

“Twisted my fucking ankle,” the words, quiet as breath, rip out of Keith derisively. Like, god forbid he have an ankle if this is all it’s good for. It’s impossible to see under the boot, but Keith clarifies, just this side of embarrassed, “I can’t even stand on it,” and Lance knows it’s either a break or a sprain. 

Nodding, raising his bayard to his shoulder, Lance scans the area. The sniper has moved, based on the shot marked permanently into the sand. Somewhere higher up now. 

Blue eyes go wide, and Keith thinks they look a little feral, scanning the gnarled gaps and twisted tops of the coral forest. Nothing. Just the pale, pale, bleached white that looks something like heavy fog under the moon.

There.  _ There _ . The tiniest spot of purple, a galran uniform. Lance does not hesitate, just fires. Sharpshooter– who had called him that? The purple slumps, and tumbles over the ridges of coral into the magnetic sand. Color seeps into it. Color at last. 

But the sniper had been the recon, and here come the reinforcements, loud and bumbling and clumsy as was the trademark of the galran ranks. Every step echoed, out of tune and rhythm, off the contorted coral walls. Lance hears them coming from a mile away. They saw his shot drop their sniper and they take that as an invitation, so Lance drops any pretense of stealth.

“Galra are here– Shiro, Allura, I don’t know if they’re working with the natives. Pidge, Hunk, we’re going to need backup, Keith’s hurt.”

“Roger that,” Pidge replies, “on our way down.”

“I’ll ready the castle defenses,” Coran adds.

Neither Shiro nor Allura responds for a minute, but eventually Allura informs them “The natives were not involved.”

“She made  _ very _ sure,” Shiro sounds a little exasperated. 

The troops, and there had to be a lot of them, are closing in. There is no way one disabled melee combatant and one long-range combatant can take on a battalion, and the window for escape is rapidly closing.

“Fuck it.” Old Lance never would have done this, but then again old Lance isn’t here, so Lance throws Keith over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes, anchoring him with a solid grip on his knees, and says “I’ve got you,” keeping his rifle’s safety off and pointed out at the hip.

“Wonderful,” Keith grumbles, but he wants to laugh. Under any other circumstances, being thrown over Lance’s shoulder would have elated him. 

Then he sees them, and they’re not marching they’re  _ running _ . The front lines have swords– but Lance has a gun, and they go down easier than the back lines as he dodges behind whatever coral is big enough to use as cover. Lance’s bayard is whatever Lance needs, and he currently needs a machine gun, so that’s what they’re working with. Not every shot is a headshot, but any shot is pretty incapacitating when it rips a four-inch hole. A two-foot height advantage does not matter. 

They keep backing up, keep backing up, and the coral forest goes on for miles in every direction, but the atmosphere is still that heavy, magnetic air, and Keith still weighs well over a hundred pounds without the suit. Lance is out of breath, sweating, and Keith can see the battle-hardened perseverance of exhaustion in the way his eyes are starting to haze over.

They’re both trying to figure out a way to make this work when one shot rings louder. Not because it’s from a different kind of gun or because it has plot significance, but because it is right next to their ears. In fact, this shot has blown off part of Lance’s arm, and another part of his stomach, and splattered it over Keith’s face. A glancing shot, no organs spill out, but there is a lot of blood. Lance doesn’t seem to realize what’s happened as shock blinds every sense for one, two, three, four seconds, and then he falls behind a rocky divider, and Keith lands crumpled around and over him, and they’re the equivalent of a ragdoll and a blanket for a moment. Two. Three. Four. 

“ _ Lance!! _ ”

There’s about four people’s worth of job to do and only one Keith. Keith, a bleeding Lance, and a horde of galran troops.

“Color,” Lance murmurs, blue eyes way too wide, breathing in slow, choked gasps.

“ _ Hunk we need an evac, asap. _ ”

Keith is yanking Lance’s bayard out of his hands and molding them against the bleeding gaps of flesh and holding the bayard in his own two hands and hoping it will work for him. Of course, Lance’s bayard is whatever Lance needs it to be, so it operates perfectly for Keith. He’s no sharpshooter, but when the galra are funneling through a small gap in the coral, barely one at a time, he doesn’t need to be. 

A buzz stimulates the air as the magnetic sand begins to vibrate in patterns. Hunk is crunching yards of trees an dozens of galra under Yellow’s paws as he sets down barely seven feet from Keith and Lance. 

Lance is about the same color as the sand. Hunk is the only one around to hear how strangely Keith’s vocal cords warp when he screams and sobs like that.

Hunk drags Lance into Yellow and stabs him with something Keith doesn’t recognize. It’s a reviver. Coran had formulated a few of them based on an altean device mixed with human biology. It will replace the function of Lance’s vitals for six doboshes. Keith still can’t remember how well that lines up with a minute, and it has him panicking, shoving the thick cloth he dragged out of a medical storage bin into the missing sections of Lance’s arm and side. Yellow does most of the flying because Hunk is too busy throwing up. 

At the castle, Coran has a pod ready, has had a pod ready since they descended to the planet’s surface because the man does not trust those he has not met. They shove Lance into it and the haze of fog hides just how much of Lance’s suit had been slimy with blood. That is, it obscures Lance entirely. Too much lost blood. Even Hunk and Keith know this, with their limited knowledge of medicine. How will the pod replace the missing chunks of human flesh? The blood? 

Coran admits he hardly knows how the pod works in the first place, only a few of the basic instructions. He had been a royal advisor, not a doctor. 

Shiro, Allura, and Pidge arrive less than ten minutes later. They had not called Keith and Hunk back out because they had not been needed, and would hardly have been helpful in their current states. The natives, Gielans, had been more than ready to fight for their planet alongside Voltron, and the single platoon of galran forces had been short work. Overwhelming for two paladins. Easy for three paladins, a lion, and an entire culture. Keith still feels guilt heavy and nauseous in his stomach. 

After one precipitous drop in the middle of the night that has Keith screaming himself hoarse at the pod, like Lance can hear him, vitals go stable and stagnant. 

Once again, everyone waits for Lance to get better. They’re all getting tired of Lance being in situations where he needs to get better. They will wait. Paladin. Comrade. Teammate. Brother. They will wait. But they hate it. 

Two days later, the pod opens without warning, sending mist scattering and Lance crumbling. Pidge and Keith had been the only ones in the room, and they can’t move fast enough to get to him.

A few questions answered: the missing tissue has been replaced with tentative scar tissue, fragile and thin and thready; blood has only been replaced to a minimum, leaving Lance pale and groggy and weak. The pod ate him up, did what it could, and spat him back out to do the same. 

“ _ Lance! _ ” Pidge exclaims, while Keith gathers as much of Lance as he can in his arms like it’ll help something. “Do you remember me?”

“Why wouldn’t I, Pigeon?” Lance mumbles, throat dry and voice cracking. His eyes blow wide and he stiffens, “Did someone wipe my head again? Keith, you can’t lie to me, how long have I been in that pod?” He’s frantic in a way that says it’s not really that frantic, and Keith has the energy back to smile, sideways and thin.

“Two days,” Keith tells him. 

“You sound worse than I do,” Lance comments idly, raising a hand to pat the side of Keith’s face in something like comfort. 

“I was screaming at you,” Keith says.

“For, like, four hours,” Pidge corroborates, “it was one in the morning and I already have a hard enough time sleeping,” but her eyes dart to the ground and she adds, “not that I can blame him.”

Before Lance can even ask, Keith answers. “You kept dying,” the hoarseness of his voice makes it worse. “Over and over, you’d die for a few seconds and the pod would drag you back to life and then you’d die again.”

“You technically wouldn’t be alive right now, if we were on Earth. A doctor would have given up.” Pidge says, and the look in her eyes says that she had. Pidge runs on statistics, math, science, things that made sense. She hadn’t been trying to sleep she had been trying to grieve because, statistically, mathematically, scientifically, Lance should not be alive. 

Lance wonders if he had heard Keith, and finds the memories, hazy and unreliable, actually exist. 

_ Don’t you fucking die on me! _

_ I swear I’ll never forgive you! I’ll never forgive myself! _

_ What do I have to say? I’ll– I’ll cut my hair, I’ll let you put weird stuff on my face, I’ll let you– NO, FUCK, NOT AGAIN _

_ Please, Lance, stop this shit! _

Of course, the memories are obscured by pain and shattered into fragments between his bouts of death. Abused and torn up, like toddlers with monopoly money. 

“Sorry,” Lance chokes.

“As you should be–” Pidge jokes, “dying once is an accident, but dying hundreds of times over the course of two hours? That’s just inconsiderate.” And then all three of them are laughing. 

“ _ Wait! _ ” Keith shouts suddenly, realizing what needs to be done, and he lifts Lance up and carries him, actually sprinting, which Pidge is surprised he has the energy for, and runs into the kitchen screaming “He’s  _ alive! _ ”

What Lance doesn’t know is that everyone, after those four hours, had assumed he was done for, never to leave a pod, and most had not had the heart to go check on him. That, and nobody had told Hunk any of this, because they weren’t sure how he’d react and they didn’t want to risk losing another paladin: after sleeping off the battle for the whole of the first day, he had been stress-baking.

When Keith skids to a halt in the kitchen, where everyone else (save Pidge, who is trailing behind at a slower pace) has settled into preparing breakfast, he gives them a shit-eating grin and holds Lance out like a trophy and says “He’s alive,” in a tone that says ‘eat shit, I told you so.’

Shiro had been standing to held set the table, falls into a chair and laughs, to days of grief consoled in an instant. Allura is already sitting, but her drink clatters to the floor and she grins wide and ebullient. Coran’s shoulders sag with the relief. Hunk says “of course he is, he’s a tough guy,” and for a minute everyone is really glad they didn’t tell Hunk. 

“Keith, for fuck’s sake, I have little legs,” Pidge huffs, out of breath from following them into the kitchen. 

But Keith’s eyes are practically sparkling because, for the first time, it’s really hitting him, “but he’s  _ alive _ , Pidge.”

“I know, I know,” Pidge waves a hand, exasperated, “you’re in love with him, and now’s a perfect time to tell him, but for chrissakes don’t make me  _ run _ about it.”

“To be fair,” Lance says, peering over Keith’s shoulder to be able to look at Pidge, “you didn’t have to run.”

Pidge grumbles and concedes the point. She hadn’t thought that far ahead, she just didn’t want to be alone in that room, and she didn’t want to lose sight of Lance again.

“Well,” Allura sings, “I think we should all eat some breakfast to regain our strength. Hunk has made– what did you call this, Hunk?”

“Pancakes. Kind of.”

“Keith, will you put Lance down,” Shiro says, getting some more of his  you’ll tear the new skin.” Shiro spends half a second in horror watching Keith drop Lance out of the air, only to catch him in a more comfortable spot. It knocks the wind out of both of them because Keith does not have the muscular capacity to do this, and the energy is coming from an adrenaline high of the best sort. 

“Will you kids just sit down like normal people?” Coran laughs.

“When Keith lets me down, sure.”

“Do you want to be let down?”

“Buddy, I’m not sure if I could even stand on my own right now.”

“Then I won’t let you down.”

 

(Keith does eventually set Lance down in a chair)


End file.
